


Living in Three Dimensions

by argle_fraster



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, Season 2, because she's awesome, playing with side effects from lydia's immunity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-03
Updated: 2012-09-03
Packaged: 2017-11-13 11:02:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/502823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argle_fraster/pseuds/argle_fraster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia finds the full moon post-bite.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Living in Three Dimensions

The moon is calling to her.

She doesn’t have any shoes on. She’s lucky there aren’t any bramble bushes nearby, or else she’d be walking with thorns stuck in the pads of her feet, because she can’t stop herself. She pushes past the front door and into the shadows that are painting the grass black, towards the space where the tree cover opens and the moon shines down; she can see the orb hanging full between the leaves, and she keeps moving towards it without knowing why. She doesn’t even like the night. She shines better in the sun.

She walks anyway. She leaves the yard and goes down the street to the forest, where the trees meet the bend in the road and sprawl over the hills. She doesn’t like the forest, either, but tonight it smells like something - something she can’t identify. She doesn’t know why she can smell something like that in the first place, but it’s oddly soothing. Pushing it from her mind, she keeps going. There is a clearing up ahead; she doesn’t know how she knows that.

The clearing is big enough to be completely bathed in moonlight. Staring up, her breath catches, and maybe she should be feeling something - should she be feeling something? There’s a tightness in her chest, the same as when she woke up in the hospital bed with bandages stuck to her shoulder and a breathing tube in her nose. She struggles to breathe normally. Maybe she’s dying.

When her adrenaline starts rising and her heart starts to pound, something inside her breaks, like a dam opening. For a wild minute, she is completely terrified.

Lydia looks back up at the moon, and blinks.

It wasn’t the moon that was calling to her; it was the stars.

Stretched out from her in three dimensions, she can see them. She can see the angles that connect them - Ursula Major above her head, and off to the side, nearly hidden, the tell-tale sweep of a comet. She can see the trajectory mapped out on a plane, with the x-axis running down towards the horizon.

She turns and finds Orion and 45 degree angles that she reads without focusing. She knows how far apart the stars are; she knows how hot they burn. She knows the equation for determining their life cycle and has an answer for each and every one of them. When she sucks in a shallow, burning lungful of air, the air rattles through her teeth and she can write down the formula for that, too, for the speed and strength and velocity of it.

Her knees hit the ground before she even registers that she’s crying. Even her tears - she knows the temperature, can convert it to Celsius and Kelvin - are part of the vast, all-encompassing scene she just found herself in the middle of.

“Lydia,” Peter Hale says, behind her shoulder, and just like that, everything snaps back to normal. Normal being the moon, the painted stars, and her own frenzied, horrified breathing.

There is no Peter Hale. He doesn’t really exist.

But the stars do. And Lydia still knows them by name.


End file.
